And yet by little strange accidents and coincidents how we are being found out every day.  You remember that old story of the Abbe Kakatoes, who told the company at supper one night how the first confession he ever received was—­from a murderer, let us say.  Presently enters to supper the Marquis de Croquemitaine.  “Palsambleu, abbe!” says the brilliant marquis, taking a pinch of snuff, “are you here?  Gentlemen and ladies!  I was the abbe’s first penitent, and I made him a confession, which I promise you astonished him.”

To be sure how queerly things are found out!  Here is an instance.  Only the other day I was writing in these Roundabout Papers about a certain man, whom I facetiously called Baggs, and who had abused me to my friends, who of course told me.  Shortly after that paper was published another friend—­Sacks let us call him—­scowls fiercely at me as I am sitting in perfect good humor at the club, and passes on without speaking.  A cut.  A quarrel.  Sacks thinks it is about him that I was writing:  whereas, upon my honor and conscience, I never had him once in my mind, and was pointing my moral from quite another man.  But don’t you see, by this wrath of the guilty-conscienced Sacks, that he had been abusing me too?  He has owned himself guilty, never having been accused.  He has winced when nobody thought of hitting him.  I did but put the cap out, and madly butting and chafing, behold my friend rushes out to put his head into it!  Never mind, Sacks, you are found out; but I bear you no malice, my man.

And yet to be found out, I know from my own experience, must be painful and odious, and cruelly mortifying to the inward vanity.  Suppose I am a poltroon, let us say.  With fierce mustache, loud talk, plentiful oaths, and an immense stick, I keep up nevertheless a character for courage.  I swear fearfully at cabmen and women; brandish my bludgeon, and perhaps knock down a little man or two with it:  brag of the images which I break at the shooting gallery, and pass among my friends for a whiskery fire-eater, afraid of neither man nor dragon.  Ah me!  Suppose some brisk little chap steps up and gives me a caning in St. James’s Street, with all the heads of my friends looking out of all the club windows.  My reputation is gone.  I frighten no man more.  My nose is pulled by whipper-snappers, who jump up on a chair to reach it.  I am found out.  And in the days of my triumphs, when people were yet afraid of me, and were taken in by my swagger, I always knew that I was a lily liver, and expected that I should be found out some day.

That certainty of being found out must haunt and depress many a bold braggadocio spirit.  Let us say it is a clergyman, who can pump copious floods of tears out of his own eyes and those of his audience.  He thinks to himself, “I am but a poor swindling, chattering rogue.  My bills are unpaid.  I have jilted several women whom I have promised to marry.  I don’t know whether I believe what I preach, and I know I have stolen the very sermon over which I have been sniveling.  Have they found me out?” says he, as his head drops down on the cushion.